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I don't know if it's just me, but the Lewis Payne picture looks like it wouldn't be out of place in a Calvin Klein ad. His hairstyle looks like it'd be fashionable nowadays. I know the guy's actions were horrific, but damn if he doesn't look cool.

I never understood those weird descriptions they gave to colognes. Reminds me of what Lee Mack edit: andDylan Moran said (Got 'em mixed up). "I see her, I want her. She is what she is. She sees, but she is blind. She has legs, but she has no legs. She's alive, but she's dead. She's a woman, but she's a monkey."

Payne also used the name Powell. Didn't look too cool shortly thereafter:

"While hangman Christian Rath was placing the noose over young Powell's head he remarked, "I hope you die quick." He had been impressed by Powell's courage and determination in the face of death. To this Powell replied, "You know best, captain." However, Powell did not die quickly as hoped by Rath. After the drop he struggled for life more than five minutes. His body swinging wildly, twice he "Moved his legs up into the sitting position" and was the last to die."

His role in the assassination plot was to kill Secretary of State William Seward. He entered Seward's home by claiming to have medicine for him - Seward had been badly injured in a carriage accident, and was in bed with multiple broken bones. Powell broke into the bedroom and conducted a vicious attack with a knife on the injured man. He stabbed three other people in the house as well including two of Seward's sons. Fortunately they all survived the attavk. Powell fled and hid in a tree for three days before eventually being captured. All in all, he was a real piece of shit.

Rare is an appropriate adjective on ebay, where it might truthfully describe a singular physical object, but it pretty irking to see it on reposts from r/historyporn. The picture of the suicide lady who landed on the car was collected in several Time books of Greatest 20th Century photography: there is absolutely nothing "rare" about it. /rant

Lunar dust is basically charged volcanic glass dust with traces of various chemicals. It is a major skin, lung, and eye irritant and it sticks to everything that touches it. It is said to smell like black powder smoke. For a similar effect, pulverize some volcanic glass into a fine dust and rub it back and forth on your skin. You're welcome!

During Apollo 12, regarding dust in the lunar module (LM), the crew members noted several issues: “Both LM and CM contaminated with lunar dust”; “LM was filthy dirty and had so much dust that when I took my helmet off, I was almost blinded. Junk immediately got into my eyes”; and “the whole thing was just a cloud of fine dust floating around in there.” After the LM docked to the CM, dust infiltrated the CM. Crew members gave the following account of this period of contamination: “On the way back in the CM the system could not handle the dust, so it was continuously spread inside the spacecraft by the system”; “we chose to remain in the suit loop as much as possible because of the dust and debris floating around”; and “to keep our eyes from burning and our noses from inhaling these small particles, we left our helmet sitting on top of our heads”.

This, in addition to the... errr... biological details (including the wonders of free-floating vomit and shitting into plastic bags) of some of the Apollo missions, should stand as a reminder that the moon missions were not glamorous or straightforward. For propaganda purposes, the entire process was more or less sterilized into what most people learn in school about the Apollo missions, but they really weren't pleasant trips (although you'd have a hard time convincing any of the astronauts that it wasn't worth it). Next time we go back we're going with a toilet and better EVA decontamination procedures including suit-based airlocks where the exterior of the suit just stays outside the vehicle after an EVA.

I would do almost anything, I would go through hell and back just to stand where those men have stood. Hanging up there in the great blackness looking back on the earth in all it's wonder. God damn I wish I could have been there.

Contrary to common belief, Osama is NOT in that picture. I'm actually writing an essay specifically about that picture, at the moment. American journalist Steve Coll discovered Osama was not on that trip, at all. The photo was shot in 1971, and resurfaced after 9/11 in popualr tabloids. One of them stated Osama was the second kid from the right and other media took that over, but in fact, it's not true.
So it might be one of his sisters after all!

edit: also; the original photo wasn't colored at all. The outrageously over-the-top shiny colours were invented and added afterward. There's no real telling what the actual colours of their clothes were.

The overarching theme of my essay is the phenomenon of misinterpreted circulating historical photo's, so this thread is actually really interesting in that regard :P

I'm currently getting in contact with the Swedish newspaper that originally published the picture, to read the full original article (there's excerpts of it all around the internet), and maybe to get into contact with the owners of the hotel they stayed at, as well as with Steve Colls and Peter Bergen (another journalist focusing on Bin Laden's life who wrote a bit about this particular photo).

I hope this post gets some visibility for the sake of correcting historical misbeliefs ;)

EDIT FOR PROOF: This is the original black and white photo. This has been posted before in another thread by /u/artman so credit where credit is due for that!
Excerpt from Steve Coll's book The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century:

"Years later, one of the boys in the photograph, the second from the right, would be routinely
identified in media accounts as Osama Bin Laden. There is certainly a resemblance, but Bin Laden
family members said emphatically that this was a case of mistaken identity—Osama did not travel to
Sweden with the group and was not in the picture. The family’s testimony seems convincing, as it
comes from varied sources, including some, such as Carmen Bin Laden, who have been adversaries
of the family."

second edit: This is getting a lot of upvotes and questions fast, but I have to go to a concert now so I won't be able to give further answers until after midnight. Also, turns out that the suggestion that Bin Laden is not in the picture has been noted on reddit before, by /u/syringistic.

third edit: It's funny that the first thing I ever earn as a historian is not real-life money, but reddit gold! Thanks a lot kind stranger!

As some have rightly pointed out, this research is not over. It will be interesting to figure out where the rumour started, how it got spread (and why), where Bin Laden was the actual time, and so forth. I'm guessing this will take a few weeks, but it will be done and I'll make a final edit as it happens.

EDIT (24/04/2014): The research is finished. Here is a summary of the story:

~January 1970: 13-year old Osama visits the town of Falun in Sweden with his older brother Salem. They stay in the Astoria Hotel owned by Arne and Christina Akerblad.

September 1970: Salem visits Falun again, this time with 21 of his brothers and sisters, but excluding Osama. A journalist from a local newspaper called Falu Kuriren finds this interesting and writes a little article about it. Some summer intern takes a black-and white group photo of the family. They're staying at the Astoria Hotel again.

Thirty years go past.

September 11, 2001: Terrorist attacks on the WTC towers, Osama is immediately a suspect.

September 12, 2001: Falu Kuriren receives a tip that some 'Bin Ladens' had once visited Falun. A journalist gets into contact with the owner of a club Salem had once visited. This club owner tells the journalist that there had been an article with a photo published back in the day. The journalists start digging in their archives. After a few days, they find the article and photo. Note that this original article never mentioned the name "Osama", just Salem. So they needed someone to verify who in the photo was Osama, if any. In the meantime they get a seperate tip, of someone saying that for sure Osama had visited in 1970. The journalists now make the (admittedly logical) conclusion that therefor Osama was probably also present during the 1971 trip. They contact Christina Akerblad, the former owner of the now non-existent Astoria Hotel the Bin Ladens had stayed at. They fax her the photo, and she says that the second boy from the right is Osama. "I can tell by his smile". She's mixing her 1970 memory with her 1971 memory.

Falu Kuriren sells the rights of the photo to the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet.

September 21, 2001: Aftonbladet publishes the first post-9/11 article of the photo. It's still black-and-white, but interviews Akerblad saying Osama is on the photo.

Around this time, the British press agency Camera Press somehow acquires the rights to the photo. It makes sense to assume Aftonbladet sold it to them.

Camera Press sells the photo to The Sun.

September 23, 2001: The Sun publishes an article about the photo, but the photo is colourised. A source mentions how Camera Press sold not a colourised, but a black-and-white photo to The Sun. Thus, The Sun colourised the picture. Other newspapers copy this.

September 25: Journalists of The Guardian are about the first to notice the blatantly fake colours. A few other newspaper pick up on this too, but overall, the colourised photo is the one that gets spread and the original gets forgotten.

January 15, 2002: Earliest mention I can find of an interview where a Bin Laden family members denies that Osama is on this picture. This is supported by independent sources, but remains an obscure fact of the photo.

"It’s not okay to use that term. I was actually at Ground Zero. I was the first one on the scene selling erotic t-shirts. Osama bin Sexy, Sexy bin Laden and Yo Mama bin Fartin’. That last one was not erotic to everybody."

He was right about a few things but otherwise went psycho with the crap about America and how it should adopt sharia law and stop homosexuals.. He thought Clintons blow job in the oval Office was a big deal which will be remembered in history as a great calamity. Hilarious.

I love it. We'll never know what he was really thinking, but I would like to think that he was laughing at the absurdity of the whole situation. A lovely, hearty, amused, existentialist laugh..."wow this is ridiculous...life is such a bizarre ride." There are far worse ways to go out.

This man is probably laughing because he is considering the ramifications of what's happening. Stalin very early in the war declared that anyone who defected or was captured would have their entire family put to death (with some obvious exceptions, Yakov Dzhugashvili). If you were executed publicly, your family got to live. The 'decree' served to coerce the men to fight to the death.

It's important to note though that the entire country wasn't like that. Every time pictures like this surface of well-dressed women seemingly living normal lives is the very very rich minority that existed in the state. A lot of Afghanistan was still poor, the economy was in the shitter, and many towns and villages looked as they do today. While it is true that they were moving towards a democracy, the women in that picture were obviously extremely well off compared to the rest

Not necessarily. There was a small but growing middle class that enjoyed this lifestyle of which my family was a part. We were by no means rich, both my parents worked; my mother as a teacher and my father as an radio and television engineer. Even our relatives in the outlying villages dressed like the women in the photo (though I believe it's Iran, not Afghanistan) because they wanted not to be associated to with the 'dehyaki' or 'dehati' the country people. It was a trend that was spreading well beyond the cities and well beyond the middle class by the time we left in the 80's.

More than that though, her communication skills (and subsequent understanding of the world) were far more developed than one might offhand expect. She could read braille, and eventually learned to read lips with her hand.

I have mixed feelings about this statement, but having a lifetime without sight or sound to distract you gives you a lot of time to think about the world. She probably had a pretty good idea of what he did.

That all said, her and Mark Twain's relationship, or the time she tried to elope with her assistant make for more interesting reading, I think.

If the Earth is destroyed in a billion years and the moon somehow survives, I would love to see the look on the alien's face when they find just the one picture of another species, but no evidence of anything else.

Pretty much. Since the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, the radiation from the sun would go right through space and end up breaking up the compounds that render colour eventually, like when you leave a poster to direct sunlight and it starts becoming bluish and fuzzy.

There is a lot of radiation in space. Remember that light is a form of radiation. But there's so much more.

People think of the sun as being a ball of burning gas or fire, but that's quite far from the truth.

The sun is a huge nuclear fusion reactor shaped like a sphere held together under its own gravity with a diameter 109 times larger than Earth. It throws out intense radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum - including light. Solar flares are eruptions of matter from the sun's surface which spray electrons, ions and atoms into space - this can cause radio interference on Earth and Aurora near the poles.

There is also radiation from outside the solar system, including from stars in the Milky Way and X-Rays from black holes. Cosmic Rays from supernovae also factor into the background radiation of our universe.

Radiation is abundant in space. Earth's relatively thick atmosphere absorbs much of it, giving life a chance. But the stuff that does sneak through has played a powerful role in the random mutations that, through a process of evolution, resulted in human beings actually existing.

I absolutely hated history more than any other subject, especially all the political mambo chahambo. Now that I'm older I am obsessed with history and it always blows my mind, especially personal pictures like these.

Every time something historical is posted, someone says this. If they included every little thing like this in your high school history book it would be 100,000 pages and you'd be bitching about how much you hate history

That actually makes so much sense. I've always wondered why Paul is barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road. It's often used as a piece of evidence for the Paul Is Dead theory.

But now this photo explains it. He showed up to the shoot wearing those black sandals. He thought they looked goofy (because they do), and wanted to wear something else. Of course there weren't pairs of shoes just laying around on the street, so he just said "fuck it! I'll go barefoot!"

I've met a couple and they were very nice. Evil people can come from nice families.

A couple of Hitler's relatives (nephews I believe) lived in the U.S. in secrecy under an assumed name and worked in lawn care. They're identities were only known to the lawyer who looked out for their legal concerns. Allegedly they both chose not to marry or have children because they wanted the family to die out, which is kind of sad in a way.

It's amazing how the girl who committed suicide from jumping HUNDREDS OF METRES doesn't look mangled. I've seen videos of people playing soccer ffs with worse looking injuries, and soccer isn't even a contact sport.

He wasn't punching the guy for the last spot. The helicopter was attempting to take off and simply couldn't carry any more people. The helicopter would have been swamped and not have been able to take off safely if people were climbing and grasping on it.

Can you imagine that level of desperation, that you'd consider hanging onto the side of a helicopter?

My mom was at the embassy the day before, but the people there told her they weren't able to help her or her baby daughter get out. Fortunately for me, she managed to get herself to American airbase the next day and got us on one of the last flights out.

I look at her now... a little timid because of her lingering accent, plumper in her old age...and think back to that brave young mother who fought like hell to get her baby out of Vietnam...and what I would have been if she didn't.

"An American official punches a man in the face trying to break him from the doorway of an airplane already overloaded with refugees seeking to flee Nha Trang, April 1. The man was trying to board the evacuation plane. Nha Trang was overrun by Communist troops after this plane left."

I find it difficult to believe that the US would leave american citizens there. I assume that those were the supposed passengers trying to hinder too much people to board, which would make it impossible to take off.

Remember also that this wasn't "Iran in its natural state before things got messed up." This is after the CIA went in during the 1950s and ousted the government and put a very western-leaning Shah in its place. He was really committed to Westernizing Iran, which was a factor in fermenting the revolution that ousted him.

My mother said it physically hurt her to return to Afghanistan. Everything she saw was like a getting punched in the gut and having the wind knocked out of you. After a week she just pretended she was in a different country altogether so she could cope.

Why do people keep saying pre- Taliban? It was Pre- invasion by the Soviet Union which left the country in scrambles and criminals were running wild in every city. The creation of the Taliban was a reaction to the situation in the country, when a bunch of students(studying Islam I think) started the Taliban to put an end to it. Eventually it ended up in the wrong peoples hands and the US and Al Qaida had something to do with that.

I think the photo of the women in Afghanistan is really important. The dress and treatment of their women is not based on thousands of years of history and tradition though; it's new and oppressive. Some cultures have always been a certain way and know no different (doesn't make it right but it's their way of life. The women of Afghanistan can remember being free and having their rights stripped.

Actually it IS based on their tradition and history. What you're seeing in that photo is the result of King Amanullah Khan's attempts to modernize Afghanistan beginning in 1928.

Some of his reforms included the outlawing of the Burqa, the support of women's education, and the opening of coed schools, all of which angered tribal and religious leaders. So much so that they launched a rebellion against him and he was forced to abdicate a year after instituting them. His cousin and successor, also a supporter of modernization (albeit a more gradual one), was assassinated for it a few years later.

The next few decades saw back and forth conflict between modernist forces, spearheaded mostly by the Marxist "People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan", and the traditionalist forces, led by the mujahedeen and later the Taliban, with the traditionalists winning out in the end and bringing us to the modern day.

So even though I'm sure it's worse now than it was in the past, due to the Taliban's religious extremism, the treatment of women in Afghani culture is not a new development. It's much more accurate to say the increased rights and freedoms their women held in the past few decades before Taliban rule were an anomaly in Afghani history. A failed attempt by the country's former leaders to move the nation away from tribal customs and religious fundamentalism and into the modern age.